"When you're at home, it's harder to focus due to too many distractions, like your phone, family and like your bed being comfortable," said Hsereh Gay, a junior at Hutchinson Central Technical High School and a student Community Health Worker.
"I don't think the teachers want to do it, most students don't want to do it, and we don't want to do it as parents," said Ed Speidel, who leads the District Parent Coordinating Council. "We told the superintendent the other day, 'Just have a snow day. We can figure it out — if it's a state of emergency, those snow days don't count anyway.'"
"Nobody likes remote instruction," said Rich Nigro, Buffalo Teachers Federation president. "We didn't like it during Covid. It can't take the place of authentic instruction face-to-face, but it's an option. If you're presented with two bad choices, it's the better of the two bad choices."
With a crunched calendar and regular bouts with severe weather, remote learning days appear to be unavoidable in order to meet the state's requirement of 180 instructional days, and one still universally preferred to trimming from winter vacations.
Buffalo Schools spokesperson Jeffrey Hammond emphasized safety considerations often dictate remote instruction.
"Although it is well-known students learn best when in school, a remote day allows districts to keep students safe while allowing them to stay connected to learning during harsh weather conditions," Hammond said. The district's website includes links relevant to learning remotely.
It's also apparent, at least from interviews conducted by The Buffalo News, that Buffalo Schools is not yet in position to do remote learning well.
"We're not ready to do it, and that's not a shot at anybody — it's a fact," Speidel said. "We did it in 2020 because we were forced to do it, and nobody's ever given us the funding to develop a real virtual program."
WHY REMOTE DAYS HAPPENED
Remote learning in Buffalo Schools was inescapable once frigid, wintry weather collided with state tests and a reshaped district calendar.
Buffalo Schools endured perhaps the choppiest two and a half weeks of scheduling since returning to full, in-person learning following the pandemic. The second half of January featured the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday; three snow days; three days of high school Regents exams; and either two or three remote learning days for elementary and high school students, respectively.
Disruptions were felt most acutely by high school students, who had just two days of regular, in-person learning from the Jan. 15 snow day until the first day of February.
The calendar chaos put Buffalo Schools in a difficult position once it exhausted its three allotted snow days on Jan. 15, 20 and 26. The third closure, since it came under Gov. Kathy Hochul's state of emergency declaration on Jan. 23, does not technically count as a snow day, but it requires a waiver in future months. In past years, Buffalo built in more flexibility for snow days, Nigro said, but recent changes have made it more challenging to squeeze in 180 days of instruction.
"There's a lot more holidays now," Nigro said, "and that erodes away at days that would otherwise have been snow days."
It's not just severe weather forcing remote learning. Buffalo Schools' aging buildings and the city's vulnerable infrastructure have forced several schools — Lorraine and Riverside academies, as well as West Hertel Elementary — to learn remotely at various times this school year.
THE PROBLEM WITH DEVICES
The timing of district decisions for remote learning and the ensuing in-school scrambles to prepare invited scrutiny. But there's no greater barrier to remote learning than device access.
On its website, Buffalo Schools says each student is supplied with a school-issued device to be used for learning in and out of school. Parents can purchase insurance to protect the devices, and for some technology, the first repair is free.
Several people interviewed stressed the policy, in practice, is much different.
"This year, there have been more than a couple, probably three or four conflicting directives coming from (the IT) department to the buildings, ranging from every student's going to have a laptop to take home, to the laptops are going to stay in the buildings," said Nigro, the union president.
At Leonardo Da Vinci High School, sophomore Abdullah Alhaneef says students' devices remain in school unless families sign a liability waiver. For remote learning recently, he was grateful for that permission.
"Luckily, I had a laptop with me, because if you sign a paper, you can get a device with you to take home," explained Alhaneef, also a Community Health Worker. "But not all students were in possession of tools and devices to participate in platforms such as Schoology, Teams or just to access the assignments posted by the teachers."
Marisol Antonetti of the District Parent Coordinating Council said there was no device transport for her two teenagers at International Prep. "Under no circumstances are they allowed to let them bring them out of the building," she said. Antonetti said her freshman tried to access a district platform on his phone, but the link did not work, and other functions he needed weren't available.
"Microsoft Word, if they have to type up a paper or something, their cellphones are not compatible with that," she said. The helplessness took a toll, she said.
"He gets really angry if he misses things that he needs to get done, or if they're not done in a timely manner," Antonetti said.
The School Board has been critical of the district requiring parents to take some financial responsibility. Even so, replacing devices is not cheap. The board approved $1 million in June to replace outdated iPads, then $1.65 million in August to replace 2,800 laptops that were lost or broken. Factoring in devices for teachers and students entering the district, plus software, security and vendors, annual sums can exceed $10 million.
Most families have some technological recourse, or at least work to be done at home, the district said.
Antonetti, a parent engagement liaison at School 18, did not understand why her high school children didn't have the same experience as the elementary students with whom she works. School 18 sent home work packets, largely mitigating device issues.
"I know for sure there's a lot of families who do not have devices," she said.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Student Community Health Workers agreed on one step forward: alert students in the fall of a general plan for remote learning.
"What they should have done was prepared us and told us what we were going to do," said Gay, the Hutch-Tech student. "Yes, you can't really expect it, it's kind of a surprise — but you could also plan it out, tell us [before] what assignment we would do."
A strategy for devices would be meaningful, too, Alhaneef added. Equipped with a school laptop, he said opening Schoology and checking each class for assignments was straightforward. Logging into Microsoft Teams for attendance and instructions was not too bad, either.
Timing is vital, too, for students and teachers to pull off a remote day. Even for students who have permission to bring devices home, many will leave them at school to charge the battery. If the district can provide enough notice of a remote day, more students will likely remember their devices, and teachers — especially in grades that change classes — have more time to communicate expectations to students.
"If I have seventh grade English at School 30 and I get a message from my administrator at 2 o'clock to get work together, I've already seen four of my five classes for the day, right?" said Nigro.
The outcome will always be imperfect, interviewees said. The break in routine and lack of resources at home will continually be a problem for students with disabilities on remote days. Families without Internet access do not have an obvious solution.
Overarching district guidance applicable to all schools would reduce some of the stress when remote learning is declared, he continued.
"If you have a process that's already defined, in place from the top down, then it takes all the guesswork out," Nigro said.
© 2026 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
